This unlikely pairing has assembled a program that defies musical genres, expands the language of the string quartet and turns the banjo into a classical partner. Both Fleck and Brooklyn Rider are accustomed to smashing stereotypes, and now they are meeting on mutual ground. On Monday night, Nov. 18 at 7:30 p.m., that ground will be Samford University's Wright Center, the fifth stop on a 19-city tour.

It's something that Fleck, in veering from his instrument's traditional domain of bluegrass, has been doing his whole professional life.

“My career has been about trying as many different possibilities as I can, between the Flecktones and playing with Chick Corea, Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussain,” he said last week. “I don't think I've been considered a bluegrass banjo player for a good 30 years. There are a lot of people who do that really well, and I don't think I'm needed so badly in that area.”

A Birmingham audience has heard Fleck's classical musings before. In January, 2012, he soloed with the Alabama Symphony in his Banjo Concerto (since titled “The Impostor Concerto”), a complex, three-movement score with vibrant rhythms, flashy solos and a brilliant cadenza – in other words, everything a concerto should be. Having a banjo as the solo instrument gave it unique perspective and expanded dimensions.

On the strength of successes with the Nashville Symphony, which premiered the concerto, and ASO, Fleck was able to get a classical agency and a hookup one of the world's leading classical record labels.

“When I was able to get a deal with Deutsche Grammophon (with Mercury Classics) to put out the 'The Impostor Concerto,' we were talking about what else to do for the record and I got really excited about the idea of writing a string quartet. I asked everyone I knew who has a foot in the classical world and I got back these glowing raves about Brooklyn Rider, what they were like as musicians and people.”

The result was “Night Flight Over Water,” a quintet for banjo and string quartet, one of the pieces on the album and on Monday's concert.

Brooklyn Rider's cellist Eric Jacobsen calls it “a classically written piece. The scoring is very much in classical style in the types of techniques he uses – sometimes Indian, sometimes American, all over the place.”

Even though the work combines traditional classical instrument with Fleck's not-so-traditionally classical specialty, the musicians have formed a tight bond.

Eric JacobsenKeith Lew

“Bela calls it the 'brotherhood of the pick,'” Jacobsen said. “When the groove is so solid, the brotherhood of the pick brings people together. For us, being able to join his world, we have a 'brotherhood of the bow.'”

In a similar fashion that Fleck has broadened his instrument's possibilities, Brooklyn Rider is anything but a traditional string quartet. Although each musician has conventional classical backgrounds with sound training at the Juilliard School and Curtis Institute, they have garnered a reputation of boundary-defying programming. They have worked with composers such as Osvaldo Golijov, Philip Glass, Vijay Iyer and John Zorn, in addition to Fleck. Collaborators have included pipa player Wu Man, shakuhachi player Kojiro Umezaki, Irish fiddler Martin Hayes and Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor.

Together with his brother, Brooklyn Rider violinist Colin Jacobsen, Eric founded The Knights, a New York chamber orchestra that crosses as many performance and repertoire genres as Brooklyn Rider. Eric, in addition to being the The Knights' conductor, performs with Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble and guest conducts extensively. He was in Birmingham in March conducting the Alabama Symphony in a wide-ranging program from Schubert to the 21st century.

He said that Brooklyn Rider, which is comprised of violinist Johnny Gandelsman, violist Nicholas Cords and the two Jacobsens, never set out to perform mostly modern music.

“It happened organically. Our last album had a Bartók quartet. The album before that was Beethoven, Op. 131, so we do play quite a bit of classical music in the standard canon. The natural progression is that we're all kind of curious. We wanted to see what other things are like.”

In another unconventional practice (for classical concerts), the Birmingham program is open-ended, though “Night Flight Over Water” is more than likely to be on it.

Fleck described the work as having “a lot of motion and a lot of water.”

“It's like when I took canoe trips in Canada when I was a kid. I would be going through intense rapids and all of a sudden you would be drifting, then you would be back in the rapids at the mercy of the elements. After I finished 'The Impostor,' I realized I had a story for each movement. This piece was written directly after that. It feels like an escape from a castle, or from an orchestra hall. Like a low-class banjo player, maybe stealing stuff on the way out, he's on the run with the king's men in hot pursuit.”

Jacobsen said one goal of the tour is to create new music with Fleck.

“We have a few other pieces that we're going to workshop and then decide what we're going to play,” he said. “It's an extremely organic way of making music. My brother Colin wrote a piece that we're going to incorporate Béla in, called 'Brooklesca.' Then we'll play others, both that Béla wrote and some other traditional tunes. The quartet will play something alone as well. With Bela being such a hero and someone who brings in audiences, we can rehearse and decide what works in the moment. That's a luxury.”

Fleck hinted at another composition of his as well.

“I wanted music for just us, so I wrote another piece, about 16 minutes long. It's untitled, so we'll be running that up the flagpole. They can call it 'Too Long,' or whatever they want to call it.”